AND THE HITS KEEP COMING: Yankees' Derek Jeter hits an RBI single in the fifth inning against the Cleveland Indians at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.Getty Images

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Inside the Legacy Club at New Meadowlands Stadium on Saturday night, before the 1986 Super Bowl Giants would begin dumping Gatorade buckets of unadulterated love and hilarity over each other 25 years later, Ann Mara, the wife of legendary owner Wellington Mara, sat in the middle of the team photo holding a football.

“And they’re snapping away at pictures, and they’re about done with the pictures, all of a sudden who comes running into the room? I guess he’s out in the bathroom or something — it’s Bobby Johnson, and he’s late,” Phil McConkey said yesterday at the fanfest/reunion at the Meadowlands Exposition Center. “But that’s Bobby Johnson — he was late for games! And we . . . just . . . howled. Guys started screaming ‘Déjà vu!’ Because it was in-credible! You could not have staged it. It brought tears to our eyes. It just culminated the whole event where nothing changed. It’s 25 years since we have been in the locker room together. It might as well have been 25 hours.

“And when you look around and you see the faces and you see the bodies — you don’t see age, you don’t see gray, you don’t see pot bellies. You see warriors. You see guys that, for a flicker of a moment, you think: ‘You know what? We can go do this again!’ Because the body ages, the spirit never does.”

George Martin introduced Harry Carson, their Hall of Fame captain who painstakingly organized this reunion, as Captain Emeritus.

Carson thanked his brothers for making the sacrifices they did to come back. Bill Parcells, beaming with pride, welling with tears, spoke next:

“What a great thing we accomplished, and I told you guys back then it would stay with you forever, and here we are 25 years later. One of the most gratifying things about this team, besides what it accomplished on the field,” Parcells told them, “whenever any one of them seemed to be in some form of distress in later life, all the others — all the others — went to assist him. That’s probably the thing that I’m most proud of because that’s what a team’s supposed to be.”

Jeff Rutledge learned that seven years ago.

“I was in an automobile accident, and thanks to all the guys who called, but Harry Carson drove all the way to Brentwood, Tenn.,” Rutledge said. “He drove seven hours, to make sure that I was OK. And once he saw that I was OK, and we spent two hours together, he got back in the car and he went back home.”

Phil Simms said this was the first time he had addressed the whole team, and drew laughs talking about his heated sideline exchanges with Parcells: “ ‘Would you just follow the game plan and throw the ball and let me coach this game?’ ”